Australia's eSafety Commissioner released new data showing that more than 80 percent of children continue to use social media three months after the country's under-16 access ban took effect in December 2025. The figure dropped only marginally from initial levels to 81.5 percent at the three-month mark. The report attributed this to a relatively low barrier to continued account access, with little need for children to rely on workarounds to obtain or maintain access. The finding comes as millions of accounts believed to belong to under-16 Australian users were reportedly mass-deleted or restricted across major platforms to comply with the Online Safety Act amendment that took effect in December 2025.
The Australian data illustrates the structural challenge of blanket age-based access restrictions: compliant users are excluded, but motivated actors—including both minors and offenders—remain active. A platform operated by Guardii takes a fundamentally different approach, monitoring children's messaging activity in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other services to detect grooming, sextortion, CSAM distribution, cyberbullying, and other harms as they occur. Rather than requiring every user to verify their age or barring entire cohorts from a service, the AI-driven detection layers flag hostile or exploitative contact at the point of contact, surface a child in acute distress to a parent or school safeguarding lead, and enable rapid escalation to authorities when a criminal threat is identified. Where a mandate seeks to prevent harm by restricting access, targeted behavioral detection addresses the harm itself without displacing offenders to unmonitored channels or imposing the privacy cost of universal age verification.
